Pettiness is the tendency of people without large purposes.

Liberalism is wrong because it doesn't work. If a company is too big to fail, it is too big to exist.

On a throne at the center of a sense of humor sits a capacity for irony. All wit rests on a cheerful awareness of life's incongruities. It is a gentling awareness, and no politician without it should be allowed near power.

The future is usually just like the past- right up to the moment when it isn't.

The civil forfeiture law - if something so devoid of due process can be dignified as law - is an incentive for perverse behavior: Predatory government agencies get to pocket the proceeds from property they seize from Americans without even charging them with, let alone convicting them of, crimes. Criminals are treated better than this because they lose the fruits of their criminality only after being convicted.

The euro pleases dispirited people for whom European history is not Chartres and Shakespeare but the Holocaust and the Somme. The euro expresses cultural despair.

I say statecraft is soulcraft. Just as all education is moral education because learning conditions conduct, most legislation is moral legislations because it conditions the action and the thought of the nation in broad and important spheres in life.